While I have been quite happy with sites like Coursera, Udacity, Codecademy, edX etc. etc. Sites where you can study Computer Sciences, among st one of the many subjects, online for free. I always wondered why Linux was the great missing factor on all these sites. Well that has changed

I am happy to announce that edX will start a free online Linux introductory course It will start in the 3rd quarter of 2014. You can sign up here.

This course is created shamgar and it is an introduction course to the basics Command Line and consists of 7 levels. If you are new to Linux or decided to finally sit down and master that scary beast() called CLI, I would highly recommend to do his course first. To be fair, I consider this course a warm up course to the more advanced and sometimes abstract Shell-Fu course.

I know that the best way of learning CLI is buy actually using the Command Line, but I also believe having the basics ingrained in your brain will go a long way If you are studying for Linux Essentials or LPIC-1, I highly recommend to go through the Linux/UNIX Command Line course first. It will only take an hour or two to get through it, but you will benefit so much from finishing this small course first!

In matter of fact, I see the Linux/UNIX Command Line course as necessary additional practice in order to pass the basic Linux exams. Take a look:

Also shamgar’s explanation of grep, pipe and pwd made me finally understand those commands ( Avid readers of this blog, know this is not my first basic command line course )

There are two minor things that I would like see differently though, first of all this Ruby specific command “tail -f log/development.log” seems to be out of place in this course The second thing is I would have liked if there was a level or section where you can learn/practice things about “man” and “info“.

Other then those two things, this is a great course and most definitely a must do for Linux beginners!

Suppose you want to play Minecraft, in order to do that you need to have Java installed. You don’t have to worry about versions since Java is backwards compatible, meaning the latest version of Java is capable of running software that was built in an earlier version. In this “how to” we are going to install OpenJDK which is basically a free and open source variant of Java

Fire up Terminal and log in as root:

su

Then type:

yum install -y java-1.7.0-openjdk

Mind you if you need Java to be working in your browser too, you need to install the IcedTea plug in. You install this by typing the following command in Terminal (make sure that your are logged in as root!):

yum install -y icedtea-web

To check if Java installation was succesful, go this site. You will see this screen:

Press on the “Verify Java version” button.

A yellow pop-up screen will appear asking for your permission to run.

I choose to press on the “Run this time” button After you pressed on either button, some stuffies will go on on your screen, if Java is sucessfuly installed you will see this screen:

A lot of youtube vids use IDLE in their tutorial, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. In matter of fact, it makes typing along easier if you use IDLE too, but situations like in the picture below piss me off!

I prefer this it saves me the hassle of changing screens.

So what happened in the second picture? Well, I used Python’s built in interpreter which you can open by simply typing python in the terminal. Look:

And I made the terminal’s background color transparent by changing it’s transparency. You do this by

Edit > Preferences

The following screen will appear, select the tab Appearance, in this tab you can change the transparency settings.

If you are finished with the interpreter but have other stuff to do in terminal, all you have to do is press CTRL d and the interpreter will close and you can do whatever you need to do in terminal.

Last Saturday, I bought a new netbook and tried to install Fedora 20 on it. It was quite an interesting experience, if I had to describe it in two words, I would call the entire experience pure horror. I installed Fedora quite some times, I stopped counting after the 5th install

I fucked up the couple of first installations by using an usb stick which I previously used to install Lubuntu and I didn’t see any harm in NOT wiping the usb stick clean first I just re-used it with Fedora usb creator. I am not going to bore you with the details, but let’s just say I have learned that when creating a bootable usb stick, I should wipe it clean first

When I finally managed to install Fedora 20, I noticed it was slow, it would freeze especially during multi tasking, and eventually I would get a black screen that would last 20 seconds. The culprit being my Radeon HD 8280 videocard

I managed to solve the problem, and of course I am sharing my solution with you

The usual screenshots are missing, I didn’t dare to take them while solving the problem. I was too afraid my system would freeze. Before you do this “how to” make sure your system is updated! (You do this by typing “yum update” in terminal).

(Yes, I know you can use the “wget” command instead. But when I used it, I couldn’t see when the file was finished downloading and therefore couldn’t unzip the file because it probably wasn’t finished downloading.)

After the file has finished downloading move it to your home directory (in my case it was /home/roja/) so it looks like this.

Why you ask? Well it is just to make your life easier, as from now on you only have to copy and paste the following commands

Fire up terminal. Log in as root, you do this by typing:

su

After you have typed your password, type:

unzip amd-catalyst-13.12-linux-x86.x86_64.zip

Then type this:

chmod a+x amd-catalyst-13.12-linux-x86.x86_64.run

Now type this:

yum install gcc binutils make kernel-devel kernel-headers

When this process is finished type:

./amd-catalyst-13.12-linux-x86.x86_64.run

The drivers will be installed, at some point an installation wizard will appear, you can click on “agree”. When asked choose “automatic installation”.

When the installation was finished I got an error report, I chose to ignore it Then a window popped saying I had to reboot, which I did. After the reboot, Fedora was fast as lightening and the black screens were gone